The loss had to land somewhere, and I was the softest and lowest place for it to land, and so it landed on me, the way water finds the lowest ground, without malice and without mercy and without anyone powerful ever having to feel bad about it. the waitress, the student, the girl he knew perfectly well was living shift to shift.

I would learn later that this was not even legal, that forcing an employee to cover a walkout out of their own wages is against the law in more places than not.

But I did not know that then.

Then, I only knew that my manager was looking at me with bored contempt and telling me that my family’s grocery money now belonged to two strangers who had committed a crime, and that there was nothing I could do about it.

Chapter 6 — Four Single Hundreds